Let’s have a quick tour through the last couple of weeks in American policing.

Over in Akron, Ohio, on July 3, police released a video of the shooting of Jayland Walker, a twenty-five-year-old black man who turned up dead in the autopsy room with sixty gunshot wounds following a traffic stop. Body camera footage shows eight police officers chasing down a fleeing and, it would turn out, unarmed Walker after a seven-minute-long car chase, trying and failing to subdue him with a taser, before unloading ninety rounds at the man, riddling his prone body with bullets even as it rocked lifelessly back and forth on the parking lot pavement.

A few days later, fifteen hundred miles southwest in New Mexico, an Albuquerque police department SWAT team was locked in an overnight standoff with a suspect and a teenage boy he was with, who had barricaded themselves in the home of an acquaintance. According to the owner of the house, police then started “pulling off the windows, they started removing the doors, they had a machine that ripped up the tree, and so then they started throwing gas bombs in there,” and before long the house was in flames, something known to be a possibility with flash-bang grenades. The family who lived there was left homeless, their dog was killed, and the teenage boy, who wasn’t wanted by police, died of smoke inhalation.